Gray Wolf - Keystone Species

Gray Wolf - Keystone Species

By At October 15, 2021 0

Diving deeper into the topic of keystone species, we've chosen to highlight the Gray Wolf. It is a particularly critical time for the gray wolf in the U.S. right now. Now, more than ever, is when we need to help show how important these creatures are to all of us, whether we realize it or not.


A Dark History

I've re-written this article several times to not turn this into a political sermon. Whenever I start researching wolves, it takes me down so many political and historical rabbit holes. The fact is, in western culture, wolves have been used since at least biblical times to depict a ravenous villain not to be trusted. Think of all the metaphors and fairy tale depiction of wolves: A wolf in sheep's clothing, hungry like a wolf, the boy who cried wolf, the big bad wolf ... you get the point. Is it any wonder people grow up seeing them as the enemy?

Wolves were once the land-based mammal with the widest distribution across the planet. In Europe as early as the 1600's, Bounties and extreme measures began to completely eliminate wolves from the planet. Most of these actions have been fear-based not fact-based around anecdotal concerns that wolves would wipe out livestock. In reality, they are not a significant threat to livestock, but the seeds that those fairytales planted are very deeply rooted in people's minds.

These extermination practices continued to North America as colonials brought livestock to the wild west, and in fact are still going on today .. in 2021 .. history keeps repeating itself over and over again. I'm actually quite impressed wolves have managed to survive this 400+ year witch-hunt against all odds.

But I'm going to leave it at that .. if you want to really learn about how dark humanity can be to wildlife, and how many times we already should have learned the lesson that wolves are a valued and key part of ecology, go spend a few minutes researching wolves. If this leads you to wonder how you can help to protect these important creatures, please check out the petition to re-establishfederal protections for gray wolves in the U.S. by relisting them as endangered species.

Keystone Species

As we explained in our introductory article about keystone species, this term refers to species that play critical roles in an ecosystem. If they are removed, the entire ecosystem is significantly impacted .. and almost always in a negative way.

Our dark history with wolves has allowed for much scientific evidence that they are, in fact, a keystone species. They've been completely eliminated from regions only to find a struggling ecosystem left behind, to the point that we've gone so far as to transplant wolves from other areas to try to restore balance. So there is a lot of research on this subject, and yet still we keep repeating the cycle as if we haven't learned a thing.

Yellowstone is an interesting case study when it comes to the impact of wolves. In the early 1900's, government-sponsored initiatives to completely extinguish wolves from the contiguous U.S. were quite successful in their missions. In 1924, the last two wolf pups in Yellowstone National Park were killed by part rangers. for 70 years, Yellowstone was voice of all wolves, and the landscape changed dramatically and in unexpected ways.  By the 1960's, biologists were very concerned about the ecology of Yellowstone and took the issue forward to Congress, which resulted in legislative protections being implemented to help the few remaining gray wolf populations in the contiguous United States.

Protections helped to avoid complete extinction, but it wasn't enough to bring the wolves back to the areas where they had been purposely eliminated. In 1995, the U.S. government helped to reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone and Idaho by relocating 66 wolves from Canada. Thanks to this restoration of balance in the ecosystem, Yellowstone has thrived - both ecologically and financially. Visits to Yellowstone and surrounding areas have boomed thanks to eco-tourism centered seeing wolves in the wild.

This infographic helps to illustrate some of the ways in which wolves have a critical impact on nearly every aspect of an ecosystem. When wolves are unnaturally removed from a region, it has an impact on even the smallest of organisms and plants in the landscape.

Even if you want to believe the "big bad wolf" is out to get you ... consider all of the other parts of the ecosystem that you value and want to keep around .. and ask yourself if continuing to believe in fairy tales is worth losing all of that.

Behind the Scenes

I decided to hand-draw only silhouettes of the animals for this piece. This allows the focus to remain on the facts and information included. In what I hope is not a foreshadowing, it also illustrates how many aspects of our planet would go dark if not for the wolves. After scanning in the drawing, I used digital coloring to finish the piece.

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